This is in a sunny day scenario where everything in the whole cluster is disconnected while everything in another is connected. Sometimes you need to apply some logic to exclude some vms that happen to coexist within the same cluster:

UC applications aren’t only supported by Cisco on a virtual platform now, it’s the ONLY supported platform. As a “Collaboration Engineer” by title, I am usually focused on only a handful of applications, traditionally relying on the “Datacenter Guy” to provide the infrastructure and hope it works. But, it’s always good to see the whole picture.

In my opinion, virtualization is something everyone needs to know at least the basics of. You might not be the one adding a vlan to a switch anymore, but you still need to know networking.

Each VM contains two basic files: one .vmx (configuration) and one .vmdk (disc)

The .vmdk (disc) is considerably larger and contains all the bits a physical hard drive would. The .vmx (configuration) is a small, editable file containing all of the settings a physical bios chip would.

One task any Cisco UC Engineer will go through at least once is an upgrade from pre 8.6 to post 8.6 version. Two changes come about: an OS change from Redhat 4/5 to 6, and adapter change from flexible to vmxnet3.

One method is to edit the .vmx by finding it on the datastore, downloading the file, making the edits below, and import it back:

guestOS = “rhel6_64guest”

ethernet0.virtualDev = “vmxnet3”

An easier method if you are doing multiple servers/clusters at once is to use PowerCLI

2. On the vCenter, install WinSCP and run. Create 2 new sessions with saved credentials and name primary and dr. Connect to each session and accept the certificates!
3. Ensure the following is in the windows PATH, if not, add this directory: C:Program Files (x86)WinSCP
4. Create the batch file below to call winscp, start the session and run the relevant script from step 1.

VMware advertises the ability to “perform fully automated orchestration of site failover and fallback with a single click.” While this technology is extremely easy to setup and use, it’s oftentimes the small things that cause the biggest headache. SRM uses dns to propogate ip changes from the primary to secondary virtual machines. With windows this is automatic: the servers simply register their new ip addresses in dns. For linux servers, however this is not so easy, especially in my case (an avaya phone system) which provides no access to the CLI. The fix is to create a script.

Also, you may notice the “If EXIST c:primary.txt”
It was the most elegant way I could think of the check if the system was in a failover state. This file will exist only on the primary side. Credit to Derek Bickel on this one!

CIPC is a great tool for troubleshooting voice, but it kind of requires a sound card to work, which a VM doesn’t provide and sometimes that’s all you have. To get magic audio inside a VM that has no sound hardware, you can create a virtual sound card. It’s removed from the gui for some reason, but not that difficult. Just RDP to the VM and redirect the audio to your desktop!

Edit the .vmx file and add the following code: (it helps if you’re in notepad++ so the format is right)